Seafood Sampler

Much to my surprise, the Walt Disney Company has released a film that is chock full of fish, not one of which talks or sings. Strictly speaking, Disneynature, an independent Disney label based in France, is the outfit responsible for Oceans, which opened in celebration of Earth Day. (Here's the film's official site, but warning: brace for flashy multimedia overload.) And strictly strictly speaking, this is actually the English international release of Océans, which debuted in France last year.

As you might expect, the cinematography is spectacular, especially during the film's first hour. (It's probably equally good during the last third, but there may be limits to just how much gorgeous underwater imagery the human brain can absorb without growing scales.) In contrast, the informational content connected to all that beauty is disappointingly low. The narrative carries viewers from ocean to ocean, pole to equator, surface to sea bottom; the individual moments seem to link together at least loosely but there's no clear sense of a master plan or theme guiding it. Pierce Brosnan's narration works so hard to be lyrical that all the earnestness starts to grate, and the writing lets its attitude of wonder overrun any genuine curiosity about the subject.

Scientific American's Steve Mirsky and I both emerged from a preview screening of Oceans last month with the same thought: the film should really be called Ocean Life. Almost the entire running time is occupied with showing fish, whales, sharks, jellies, coral, diatoms, crabs, cetaceans, anemones, kelp—living stuff. But aside from some beauty shots of angry waves breaking over rocks, seascapes under different temperaments of sky, icebergs calving into the sea and so on, the film shows almost no interest in nonbiological matters of oceanography. If you want to know more about currents, seafloor spreading, the chemistry or even the origins of seawater... make your own movie.

The cynic in me also couldn't help but wonder about some other things:

• Can one really watch rocket launches from the shores of the Galapagos Islands? The film seems to imply as much, showing Galapagos marine iguanas crawling across rocks while a rocket takes off in the distance? I genuinely don't know, and perhaps there is an equatorial floating launch platform that has held that position.
• Oceans has extraordinary sequences that show, for example, schools of small fish attracting schools of larger ones, which in turn draw flocks of seabirds, and then shoals of sharks. It's a brilliant, bloody frenzy. Did the photographers simply get amazingly lucky about documenting this event from start to finish? Did they know how enough to improve their chances somehow? Or did they somehow make it happen? I gather that the filmmakers behind these new Disneynature productions take exceptional journalistic integrity in compiling their footage honestly, and I would want that to be true. Still, given the long record of fakery in wildlife documentaries described in this Audubon magazine article by Ted Williams, I do have to wonder.

All in all, Oceans is worth seeing as eye candy and as a gorgeous enticement to learn more about its subject, but I can't help but wish that Disney had included a few talking fish. They might have answered some questions that the filmmakers didn't.

Halo is in the Eye of the Beholder

Sure, not that anyone asked, but I'm happy to be the last person in the digiverse to voice an opinion on something that every sentient lifeform in the galaxy with a joystick and a keyboard has already exhausted: what's all this, then, about Roger Ebert saying video games can't be art?

After all, my perspective on this burning controversy is strikingly important because, in addition to having awful taste in art (beautiful! moving! inspiring!), I have played video games less than almost anyone in my generation who isn't Amish. Fact! Having learned as a young man that I lacked the hand-eye coordination to master the intricacies of Pac-Man and Pong, I decided to sit out a couple of decades worth of arcade action. And because I've mostly owned Macs since the early 1990s, my handiest hardware was outside the gaming mainstream. And because I'm fairly sure gaming consoles crawl around your home at night and suck the dreams out of your sleeping brain, I don't have one of those, either. I am an enormous amount of fun to be around.

Anyway, as someone too ignorant about the state of games to discuss their artistic achievements or lack thereof, I am sorry that the eternally awesome Ebert decided to ignite this particular conversation in these terms. Arguments about whether XXX is or isn't Art inevitably turn into wrestling matches over definitions of art or "good" art vs. "bad." The problem with those definitions isn't that they hinge on subjective judgments. It's that they almost always invest the definition in the artistic object itself. The value of art (whatever it is) emerges from the intentions of the artist and the audience's responses to the artwork, and how those two correspond. Hissing over whether something is really art or whether it's simply good or bad is uninformative. By far, the more interesting approach is to skip the labeling and to concentrate instead on how the artwork does or doesn't achieve certain ends.

For example, to say that Thomas Kinkade is not an artist is meaningless except as shorthand to others who share your tastes. By any reasonable, impartial definition, Kinkade is an artist. But he's also a stylistically bland, kitschy sentimentalist whose choice of landscape subjects is all text and no subtext; his landscapes always look like they are waiting to be peopled by a van full of sad clowns and teens from a Christian youth ministry.

You may feel differently (and of course, if you do, you are dead wrong). Yet a disagreement on those terms is far more enlightening about what we each think than any is-it-or-ain't-it-art spat.

Ebert speaks his mind on why he thinks video games fail as art, so he is at least going far past the simple name-calling. I have no idea of whether he's right in his evaluation of video games to date. On the face of it, though, I can't help but think that writing off the potential reach of an entire medium's artistic achievement for the foreseeable future is rash. A big part of his argument seems to be that the interactivity and gameplay aspects of video games compromise their ability to function as art, but I don't see a really convincing argument of why that should be the case based on principles, just examples of failed games. I'd hate to bet against what games might do down the line. But on the other hand, Ebert might well be entirely right in his dispassionate assessment of how games stand to date.

Then again, maybe that's a judgment that ought to come from somebody who ever played Donkey Kong.

Putting the "CT" back in "Creationist"

Smack your heads in shame, my fellow intellectual snobs of the Northeastern elite. We're used to sneering at the creationist follies playing out in Kentucky, Pennsylvania, Texas and elsewhere—benighted hellholes where they wouldn't know a decent bagel, a proper chowder or the correct pronunciation of "Worcester" if it were served up alongside their customary daily ration of cheese grits. But now the same buffoonery is occurring in (bless my nutmeg!) Connecticut. In short, the administration of the Weston Intermediate School has twice rejected a proposal for students in the third, fourth and fifth grade Talented and Gifted program to study the work of Charles Darwin. Such a plan seems to be completely in keeping with Connecticut's standards for science education. Mark Ribbens, the principal who first denied the plan, apparently left the school earlier this year, but a subsequent resubmission for the curriculum fared no better.

Brandon Keim at Wired Science has more details, but I'm struck by the proposition (which may not originate with Brandon) that this antievolution development in Weston is somehow different in kind from what we've seen before:

Evolution education is under attack in Weston, Connecticut, but not from the usual direction.

Nobody is promoting intelligent design in the curriculum, or asking schools to teach evolution’s “strengths and weaknesses.” There’s just an administration afraid that teaching third graders too much about Charles Darwin will cause trouble.

How does this genuinely differ in essence from the reasons usually given by evolution's opponents in education? No matter whether they attack evolution's merits directly or insist that intelligent design should be taught as a valid alternative, the antievolutionists nearly always say that "forcing" evolution on students would intrude on parents' rights to raise their children as they see fit. In other words, they are saying not to create controversy and upset the parents. And just as seems to be the case here in Connecticut, the antievolutionists often make these arguments preemptively, long before any actual outrage from parents appears.

Moreover, look at the reasons that Ribbens gave for his decision (emphasis added):

“While evolution is a robust scientific theory, it is a philosophically unsatisfactory explanation for the diversity of life. I could anticipate that a number of our parents might object to this topic,” wrote Ribbens. “It is not appropriate to have [Darwin's] work or the theory part of the TAG program since the topic is not age appropriate.”

Ribbens explained further, “Evolution touches on a core belief — Do we share common ancestry with other living organisms? What does it mean to be a human being? I don’t believe that this core belief is one in which you want to debate with children or their parents, and I know personally that I would be challenged in leading a 10-year-old through this sort of discussion while maintaining the appropriate sensitivity to a family’s religious beliefs or traditions.”

A "philosophically unsatisfactory explanation for the diversity of life"? What exactly does that mean? If the idea is scientifically robust, how does that leave it philosophically wanting? And what other ideas are more satisfying as explanations for the diversity of life? Ribbens' words sound like the rhetorical tap dancing that creationists use to say, "yes, evolution is good science, but...."

As for the argument that evolution might intrude on some families' core beliefs: either you teach evolution or you don't. Common ancestry and kinship with other organisms are central to the theory. Lots of ideas in higher education step on various core beliefs; that confrontation is part of what real education involves. Would Ribbens have quailed at teaching about the big bang and the eons-old earth because those, too, touched on core beliefs? Or on racial and religious equality? With all due respect for the staggeringly tough demands of teaching, when you aren't willing to have those fights, it's time to get out of the profession.

Moreover, is a "debate" really necessary? If any children or parents question how to reconcile evolution with their beliefs, tell them that they will need to work that out for themselves; that your job as a teacher is simply to make sure students know what the scientific answers are.

Ribbens, of course, is now gone, and I don't know whether whoever is responsible for rejecting the Darwin proposal the second time would cling to the same excuses. But if so, it's deplorable because the argument that we shouldn't do what's right because other people would think it's wrong is cowardly, dishonest or both. Maybe it sounds more familiar when phrased this way:

"Personally, I think it would be great to have a black family in the neighborhood, but a lot of people around here are still pretty racist, so maybe you should sell the house to somebody else."

Or:

"Not that I have anything against gays, but many of the parents would be very uncomfortable with having one teaching the kids, so...."

Or:

"She's perfectly qualified, but I really don't think the other men in the company would give her enough respect for her to handle the job."

Own your arguments. If you aren't for teaching the most powerful idea in science, then you're against it.

The Best Test

Physicist Michael Faraday's journal from 1849 provided the epigram currently perched on the welcome page of my personal site, and I suspect it may already be familiar to most readers of popular science:

"Nothing is too wonderful to be true if it be consistent with the laws of nature, and in such things as these, experiment is the best test of such consistency."

The first clause has developed an epigrammatic life of its own; science writers often roll it out when they want to convey appreciative awe for some brilliant intricacy or unexpected beauty of the natural world. That was certainly the intention of the late, great polymathic team of Philip and Phylis Morrison when they introduced me to Faraday's quote during the 1990s while planning the reinvention of their long-running book reviews as a monthly essay column, "Wonders," for Scientific American. (Originally, they wanted the title of the column to be "Nothing is Too Wonderful to Be True," until I gently pointed out to them that such a lengthy phrase might not even fit across the top of the page in the new design.)

Far be it from me to knock anyone's sense of natural wonder, or the power of science to uncover glories that inspire it. Yet I notice that most casual uses of the quotation leave out "...and in such things as these, experiment is the best test of such consistency." And in so doing, I think, they are unfortunately omitting the most important part of Faraday's reflection.

Faraday is, after all, not just cheering for us to marvel at nature. He is cautioning us to test our most marvelous hypotheses through rigorous experiment to see if they hold true and consistent with the rest of physical reality. The universe's inventiveness can far surpass anything we might imagine, but we therefore should not let either our own incredulity or rapture at the amazing possibilities lead us astray.

The first half of Faraday's quote makes it poetry. The second half makes it science. The union of the two yields the richest human experience from engaging the universe with all our faculties. As such, I couldn't think of a more fitting sentiment to take as a slogan.

And with this opening solemnity out of the way, away we go....